When the “boys from Bishop’s” found 9 Wellington Street back in the spring of 1973, they were not particularly discriminating. They looked past all that previous tenants had left behind, including a fridge full of rotting food and some startling decorating choices. Even the single, tiny bathroom with a bathtub only big enough to accommodate their dachshund, Toppy, failed to give them pause.
What hooked them was a commute to classes that was literally a walk in the park – a stroll through City Park would take them to the heart of campus in minutes – a dishwasher (an almost unheard-of luxury in 1970s student-quarter housing), and the chance to escape McNeill House.
Not that there was anything wrong with the residence itself, then for men only and less than two decades old. The problem was the people who lived there: mostly first-year guys, living away from home for the first time, and full of hormones and mayhem.
“The people in McNeill House didn’t want to study,” says Mark Stephen, Artsci’77. “There was a whole group who just wanted to play floor hockey.”
To Mr. Stephen and the three friends with whom he would share two floors at 9 Wellington for the next three years, the frat-boy antics seemed like so much juvenile déjà vu. You see, they had already spent years in raucous dorms as live-in students at Bishop’s College School, a venerable private high school (then boys-only) in Sherbrooke, Que.
At boarding school, says Peter Smith, Artsci’76, MA’78, MPA’79, “we had done all that crap: running around and dumping water on the floors … and throwing guys in the bathtub in the middle of the night… We had done it when we were real kids.”
So, when Mr. Stephen and Mr. Smith found themselves on campus with their former Bishop’s hockey teammate Michael Zinay, Artsci’76, MBA’99, and a good friend from an upper grade, Michael Lacasse, Sc’76, they were ready to be grown-ups. And 9 Wellington seemed like a decent place to practise adulthood.
And they practised it diligently. They not only dined together every night, working through a rotation of 21 menus cobbled together from family recipes, but, as Mr. Smith recalls, “we would sit together, we would laugh about the day, and then we would always have coffee and liqueurs after dinner.”
Yep, the second-year kids had coffee and liqueurs after dinner. And maybe Mr. Smith affected his beloved tweed jacket – at least until a girlfriend’s mother let him know it smelled like a dank basement closet, which is essentially where Mr. Smith lived for three years. He had the smaller of two basement rooms at 9 Wellington, the one with no access to central heat.
Mark Stephen had the bigger room at the back of the basement. “It was the party room,” he says. “I had the stereo, plus I had the blacklight and the blacklight posters.” Disconcertingly, the bedroom also had one entire wall painted in black-and-white checkerboard squares, a legacy from previous tenants, like the all-black decor of the front foyer and the multicoloured basement stairs.
When their parents visited at Thanksgiving, says Mr. Zinay, “they saw the place and were mortified.” But with parental supervision, drywall putty, paint, and elbow grease, 9 Wellington soon became “very comfortable, a lovely place to live,” says Mr. Lacasse, who shared a bunk bed with Mr. Zinay in the house’s only other bedroom, tucked behind the main-floor living room.
The couch in that living room, one of many pieces of furniture scrounged from family and friends half a century ago, has survived. “We have it at our home in Maine,” says Mr. Smith. “It’s been recovered five times. It’s a great piece of furniture.”
It’s almost as durable as the friendship of the former housemates, forged at Bishop’s and burnished at Queen’s.
Tell us about the University District house you lived in and the memories you made.
